Department of Philosophy

Department of Philosophy

Module descriptions 2020/21

Level I (i.e. normally 2nd Yr.) Modules

Please be aware that all modules are subject to availability.

If you have any questions about the modules, please contact calincomingexchangemodules@contacts.bham.ac.uk.

For many of these modules, some experience of studying Philosophy may be required, and you should remember this when choosing your modules. If there is another module that you need to have studied before taking this, it will be stated in the module description.

Please note that at the time this document has been prepared (February 2020) the following information is provisional, and there may be minor changes between now and the beginning of 2020/21 academic year.

SEMESTER 1 MODULES

MODULE TITLE MODULE CODE CREDIT VALUE ASSESSMENT METHOD

TEACHING METHOD SEMESTER

Experience and Reason 26781 20 2 x 2000 word essays (each worth 50% of the final module mark) TBC 1 (Autumn term only)

DESCRIPTION

This module examines the resurgence of philosophical theorizing and debate which took place in Europe in the 1600s and 1700s, alongside the 'scientific revolution'. It focuses on philosophers from the 'Early Modern' period broadly construed: Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume and Kant as well as a wide range of less familiar thinkers. We will examine their views on central topics in metaphysics and epistemology, introducing the main themes of the era ? particularly those that shaped the landscape of contemporary philosophy. These themes will include:

Scientific developments and their impact on philosophy. Rationalism and empiricism. Perception and the external world. The nature of substance, properties, modality and causation. Personal identity and the self. Attitudes to God and religion.

Recommended preparatory Reading: Markie, P.: "Rationalism vs. Empiricism" in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (online). Cottingham, J. (1988): The Rationalists (Oxford University Press). Bennett, J. (1971): Locke, Berkeley, Hume (Oxford University Press). Vance Buroker, J. (2006): Kant's Critique of Pure Reason: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press.)

MODULE TITLE MODULE CODE CREDIT VALUE ASSESSMENT METHOD

TEACHING METHOD SEMESTER

The Mind-Body Problem 26762 20 2 x 1500 word essays (each worth 50% of the final module mark) TBC 1 (Autumn term only)

DESCRIPTION

This module introduces central issues in contemporary philosophy of mind, focusing on the problem of whether our mental experience, especially its subjective character, can be incorporated into the naturalistic, scientific picture of the world. The first part of the course will survey such philosophical theories of the mind as dualism, behaviourism, the identity theory, and functionalism. The second part of the course will look at a more specific question about the nature of our mental states, concerning the nature of mental content: can the contents of our thoughts depend on external factors about which we do not have authoritative knowledge? We will discuss Hilary Putnam's twin earth thought experiment and Tyler Burge's thought experiment for social externalism.

I will expect students on this module to have read the core assigned reading before the weekly lectures. The material is demanding and students need to budget plenty of time to study the texts and other relevant material. Attendance at weekly seminars is mandatory.

Suggested reading: John Heil A Contemporary Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind, 3rd ed. (Routledge)

MODULE TITLE MODULE CODE CREDIT VALUE ASSESSMENT METHOD

TEACHING METHOD SEMESTER

The Ethics of Killing 26826 20 1 x 1500 word essay and 1 x 90 minute exam (each contributes 50% to the final module mark) TBC 1 (Autumn term only)

DESCRIPTION

One of the Ten Commandments is `Thou shall not kill'. But the Bible doesn't, of course, forbid all killing. And few of us, whether we have religious commitments or not, are strict absolutists about the wrongness of killing (people, in other words, who believe that taking a life is categorically never morally permissible). Indeed, most of us believe, at the very least, that it is permissible to kill a culpably wrongful attacker in self-defence to avoid being killed oneself. Someone might say that, while killing is not always wrong, it is always wrong to kill the innocent. But is even this true? What, for instance, of the woman who wants to end her pregnancy, thereby killing her fetus? Or the doctor tending to a terminally ill patient who desperately wants to die, but cannot self-administer the lethal dose of morphine that would end his suffering? Or the pilot sent on a bombing raid to destroy an enemy military target, who knows that, if he completes his mission, nearby civilians will unavoidably be caught in the blast? This module examines when killing is wrong, why it is wrong when it is wrong, and how far these moral judgments can and ought to be taken into account in law and policy-making. Topics on which we are likely to focus include abortion, euthanasia and assisted suicide, self-defence, capital punishment, and war.

Indicative readings:

?

Judith Thomson, `A Defense of Abortion', Philosophy and Public Affairs 1 (1971): 47-66.

?

J. David Velleman, 'A Right to Self-Termination?', Ethics 109 (1999):o Self-Te

?

Jeff McMahan, Killing in War (Oxford University Press, 2009).

?

Helen Frowe, `A Practical Account of Self-Defence', Law and Philosophy 29 (2010): 245-72.

MODULE TITLE MODULE CODE CREDIT VALUE ASSESSMENT METHOD

TEACHING METHOD SEMESTER

Aesthetics through History 30872 20 2 x 2000 word essays (each worth 50% of the final module mark) TBC 1 (Autumn term only)

DESCRIPTION

The first half of the module will introduce philosophical aesthetics through the lens of a number of key historical thinkers. The topics of this part of the module may include topics such as Plato's account and evaluation of art focused on the notion of imitation, Aristotle's description of the craft of poetry and his theory the role which tragedy can play in good human life, Hume's pragmatic account of judgments of taste, and Kant's aesthetics focusing on the beautiful and the sublime. The second half of the module will focus recent developments in aesthetics. The topics investigated at this part of the module may include questions such as whether art can be defined, what is the nature of aesthetic qualities and experiences, do the moral qualities of works of art affect their value as works of art, what is the ontological status of works of art, how do they acquire meaning, and so on.

Indicative readings:

Carroll, Noel (1999): Philosophy of Art ? A Contemporary Introduction (Routledge)

Graham, Gordon (2005): Philosophy of the Arts ? an Introduction to Aesthetics, 3rd ed. (Routledge)

MODULE TITLE MODULE CODE CREDIT VALUE ASSESSMENT METHOD

TEACHING METHOD SEMESTER

Logic: Its Limits and Scope 26792 20 1 x 1 hour in class exam (worth 30%) 1 x 2 hour centrally timetabled exam (worth 70%) TBC 1 (Autumn term only)

DESCRIPTION

Is there any way to make a mathematics of reasoning? If so, what would it look like? What would be its scope, and what would be its limits? One set of questions concern the extent to which we can adequately represent the subtleties of natural language reasoning in a regimented, mathematical language. Another is whether we can make a system which gives all and only the right results. We will see that we can accomplish much of what we would hope to, but not all of it.

The structure of the module is as follows. We will begin by reviewing logical argument in English, focusing on the `propositional connectives' - 'and', 'or', and 'if...then' (which should be familiar from the first-year logic modules). We will then develop, in a fairly careful way, the formal logic of just these connectives, known as propositional logic. We will prove that the system is both `sound' and `complete', in roughly the sense that every result given by the logic is right, and every right result for the logic is given by it. We will see, however, that propositional logic can only represent a small fragment of the reasoning that is representable by `quantificational' or `first-order' logic, to which you were introduced in first year. We will see how quantificational logic captures the logic of the sub-propositional connectives, `for all' and `there is', in addition to capturing the logic of the propositional ones. We will then devote a considerable amount of class time to showing that this system is sound and complete as well, despite its expressive richness, but that it nevertheless has important limitations.

Recommended preparatory Reading:

Shapiro, "Classical Logic", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Bergmann, Moor, and Nelson, The Logic Book, McGraw-Hill (any edition)

MODULE TITLE MODULE CODE CREDIT VALUE ASSESSMENT METHOD

TEACHING METHOD SEMESTER

Speaking of Things 26763 20 1 x take-home exam and 1 x 1500 word essay (each worth 50%) TBC

1 (Autumn term only)

DESCRIPTION

When you speak, write or think, your sentences or thoughts are about particular constituents of the world. This phenomenon is reference and this module examines the most important attempts that philosophers have made to explain it. 20th century authors tended to regard this as primarily a question about the relation between certain words (nouns) and the objects they pick out, and so the topic forms the most natural introduction you could hope for to philosophy of language (an area you're likely to pursue in Third Year, even if only indirectly through modules in metaphysics, metaethics, etc.). But we also refer to objects in thought, so reference is an issue for the philosophy of mind (and further, to epistemology, meta-ethics, etc.) as well as one for philosophy of language.

We'll begin with the classic debate between theorists who consider the relation between a word of the kind at issue and its referent to be direct, and those who hold it to be mediated by something like the speaker's conception of the referent. We'll explore the theories of two important advocates of the latter view ? Frege and Russell (each of whose views concern thought as well as language) and we'll assess how they deal with puzzles such as that thrown up by words and thoughts (e.g. of fictional characters) that appear to lack referents altogether. Theories of the Frege/Russell kind were subjected to fierce (and, the orthodoxy has it, fatal) attack in the 1970s and 80s by philosophers such as Kripke and Putnam, and new versions (broadly naturalistic in character) of the direct reference view emerged. We'll examine these debates and assess the new theories. Next we'll turn our attention to semantic externalism, a striking doctrine in the philosophy of mind and language that came to prominence through reflection on that new theory. This is (roughly) the view that the identity of a thought or word-meaning depends on its referent, and so in a sense cannot be wholly constituted by what's going on in a thinker/speaker's brain. Although this thesis belongs to the metaphysics of mind, it has repercussions in epistemology, where philosophers have brought considerations about reference to bear in a new attempt to rebut Cartesian scepticism. If time permits, we'll also consider another issue on the metaphysics/epistemology border: the anti-realism about reference itself which is promoted by advocates of semantic holism such as Quine and Davidson.

Recommended Preparatory Reading: Lycan, W., 2008: Philosophy of Language, Routledge; Ch. 1-4. Mart?, G., 2011: `Reference', in Kolbel, M. & Garcia-Carpintero, M., (eds.) Continuum Companion to the Philosophy of Language, London: Continuum. Devitt, M., 1998: `Reference', in E. Craig (Ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, (available on-line from the University Library). Putnam, 1981: `Brains in a Vat', in his Reason, Truth and History, CUP. (Often available on-line.)

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